Frequently Asked Questions – FAQ

What’s the difference between Like and Bookmark?
Like is a generic rating for a link that you like. You can also rate links with Reactions if you want to be more specific. Bookmark is for links to pages that contain a list of useful links, such as a news site or a collection of related videos. You can bookmark those pages that you’re interested in and new articles or content are constantly being added.

Why not just use a browser bookmark?
Your browser bookmarks aren’t very portable from one device or computer to another, not even to other browsers. Also, do you really want to clutter your browser bookmarks with possibly hundreds of bookmarks? Yes, you can save hundreds of bookmarks on Zholink and find them.

Why should I login with a social networking site? I’m concerned about my privacy.
OAuth is actually better for security since you don’t need another login password to keep track of and make sure it’s secure. Zholink uses OAuth authentication https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OAuth to allow easy access into Zholink and to help verify that you are a real person. When you use OAuth, you’ll see what permissions Zholink is requesting, and you can accept or not. Very basic information is kept, not much, and it’s not used for anything except to verify you are you and fill in your Zholink profile which you can change. Yes, you can change your profile. Zholink doesn’t require your real name like Facebook does. You have more anonymity! But wait, won’t that be an invitation for trolls? See the question related to trolls.

Since Zholink allows more anonymity, won’t trolls take advantage, post bad articles, and post terrible comments?
Zholink is strictly against trolling. This isn’t YouTube or Twitter. Trolls get warned, suspended, or banned! If something offensive is posted, use the Reaction to mark it as Trolling or Adult material. People are allowed to post vulgar or adult material, but it must be marked with a reaction (adult) so that people who don’t want to see adult or vulgar material won’t see it in their lists.

I reacted to a link to flag it, but now I see it in my list of links. How do I make this disappear?
A new setting to block tags and reaction types from your view will be added soon.

I can’t login to this site anymore. What happened?
Make sure you have JavaScript enabled in your browser.
Did you troll anyone? If so, you might have been suspended or banned. Zholink doesn’t tolerate trolls.
Otherwise, if you think it might be a technical issue, please report this issue.

Can I share videos or photos to Zholink?
You can share links to web pages, but not actual photos, videos, or links to specific photos or videos (links with extensions such as JPG, PNG, GIF, MOV, MPG, etc). If the photo/video is embedded in a web page, you can share the link for the web page. You can also share the links in popular photo and video sites, such as Flickr and YouTube.
Why doesn’t Zholink allow the direct sharing of photos or videos?
Zholink is all about saving links with context. There are plenty of other great photo and video sites. Zholink provides greater context and organization of links with the help of web pages that contain a title, summary, and keywords. Photos and videos often lack contextual information needed to help sort them.

I want to find links sorted by the all-time top liked totals or average. Why don’t you have that list?
That top links list did exist, but it became too stale and it wasn’t worth the extra processing that the aggregation server required. The top links just stayed at the top and nothing new replaced it, so it became worthless after a while.

What happens if the web page that my link points to doesn’t exist anymore?
“All good things …” Sometimes that happens. Web sites reorganize and web pages die, or entire web sites go offline. That’s the ever changing internet. It would be nice if Zholink could save all of it, but it would take so much space and get very expensive to archive. At best, Zholink could possibly save the text version of the web page, but not the media. Hopefully the Internet Archive will have an archived version or Google will still have a cached version of it.

I shared a link but in the edit field it says “no title provided”. What should I do with this?
Some web pages just don’t make it easy to get the title and summary. In fact, some web sites, such as LinkedIn, prevent services like Zholink from reading their content. When Zholink can’t read the web page, it gives you this message and allows you to edit those fields. Please fill in those fields with a matching title and summary. No one wants to see a bunch of “no title provided” links.

Why aren’t images being displayed in the media selector list?
Either Zholink couldn’t parse images from the web page, or the web site intentionally prevents viewing those images when it’s not viewed from their site. If you’re a web developer, you might also notice a bunch of browser console warnings such as “mixed content” or 401 errors. Mixed content means that Zholink is loaded over HTTPS and the link is loaded by HTTP, which causes that warning. The 401 errors occur because the site blocked images from being loaded by Zholink.